[GOAL] Re: Finding a business model for a growing Open Access Journal

[Heather Morrison]

Sounds like a great idea, Peter & Katie!

A couple of resources:

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, has  
some publications which might be useful, including Raym Crow's Income  
Models for Open Access: an overview of current practice, and  
Publishing Cooperatives: an alternative for society publishers,  
downloadable from:  http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/index.shtml 
. One model of a successful cooperative (although only some of the  
journals are OA) is BioONE, which describes itself as "a global, not- 
for-profit collaboration bringing together scientific societies,  
publishers, and libraries to provide access to critical, peer-reviewed  
research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences": http://www.bioone.org/

Chapter 4 of my dissertation covers the economics of scholarly  
publishing in transition. Key points are that the academic library  
budget is the current primary source of revenue for scholarly  
publishing,  that the average cost per article is a key metric for  
determining whether an open access system is affordable, and that an  
OA publishing system can be not only affordable, but cost a lot less  
than the current system - very important as libraries need to take on  
new services such as supporting data storage and preservation. This  
background may be helpful when talking to academic librarians about  
this project: http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/index.shtml

Some thoughts:

While SCOAP3 developed from the physics community and the success of  
arXiv, there are many ways to approach such a project. For example,  
rounding up other journals / publishers in the area of cancer research  
interested in making the transition as a first step might be worth  
exploring. Also, there are many cancer researchers who are leaders in  
OA advocacy, including Harold Varmus, Jim Till, and Francis Ouellette,  
to name a few. If you look at the ROARMAP list of institutional and  
funder open access policies, you'll see that a few have cancer in the  
name of the association, so these would be good places to look for  
friends and champions: http://roarmap.eprints.org/

best,

Heather Morrison

On 19-Jul-12, at 5:17 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

> I am forwarding a message from the OKFN's open-access list (http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-access 
>  which uses the term strictly to mean BOAI-compliant).
>
> The poster Katie runs a successful OA journal and asks how she can  
> scale up without APCs. She raises the idea of a SCOAP3-like model  
> for cancer. There must be a number of other people with the same  
> question:
> * they don't want closed access
> * they don't want author-side fees
> * they recognize the money has to come from somewhere.
>
> Katie (and I) would be interested to know of possible models and  
> possible nuclei of like-minded groups.
>
> This seems to me one of the key problems of the current time of  
> transition.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Katie Foxall <katie at ecancer.org>
> Date: Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:53 AM
> Subject: Re: [Open-access] SCOAP3
> To: open-access at lists.okfn.org
>
>
> Hello all
>
> I haven't posted [on OKFN open-access] before but have been  
> following the discussions with much
> interest and have founds the info and links provided by various people
> really useful.  I run an open access cancer journal http://ecancer.org/ecms
> which has no author fees - we are currently mainly supported by  
> charity
> funding but the journal has been growing at a great rate this year  
> so I'm
> looking into accessing any funding that might be out there to  
> support open
> access publishing.  The reality is that we will have to start charging
> author fees at some point if we can't get more funding and we really  
> don't
> want to do that as providing a free service for the oncology  
> community is
> very important to us.
>
> So does anyone know whether there is anything like SCOAP3 in the  
> field of
> medical publishing?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help or advice anyone might be able to  
> give me,
>
> Katie Foxall
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: open-access-bounces at lists.okfn.org
> [mailto:open-access-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of
> cn at cameronneylon.net
> Sent: 18 July 2012 15:50
> To: open-access at lists.okfn.org
> Subject: [Open-access] SCOAP3
>
> Not got so much press as the big announcements this week but this is  
> a big
> deal. Communities can just decide unilaterally to move to OA.
>
> http://scoap3.org/news/news94.html
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>
> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
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